Author: Michael Kirke

Michael Kirke was born in Co. Donegal and attended St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny, 1957-1962. In 1966 he graduated from University College Dublin (History and Politics). In 1966 he began working on the editorial desk of The Evening Press in Dublin and in 1968 went to the newsroom of the Irish Press group of newspapers – contributing news and features to the group’s three titles, The Irish Press (morning paper), The Evening Press and The Sunday Press. In 1969 he went to Belfast and covered the initial unravelling of the Unionist hegemony in the province. Later that year he became the group’s education specialist. In 1973 took leave of absence to pursue postgraduate studies in education in Trinity College Dublin where he graduated in 1976. In 1978 he left journalism and moved into teaching. In 1981 was appointed headmaster of Rockbrook Park School in Dublin (www.rockbrook.ie). In 1994 resigned from that post and moved to live in the West of Ireland (Galway) where he began working part-time in media again. He is now back in Dublin working, among other things, as a freelance writer. His main interests are in political, cultural and educational affairs – as well as issues related to religious faith.

“TRUE” IN EVERY WAY THAT MATTERS – SOME OF THE TIME

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

For Hollywood, it seems, history is the new rock’n’roll. Anne Applebaum, writing in the Washington Post recently on the spate of films centered on historical events or historical characters puts it down to the phenomenon of reality TV. She quotes Peter Morgan, who wrote the script for The Queen – a movie focused on the aftermath of the death of Princess Dianna: “If people need to explain what a film is about, the film stands very little chance of surviving. Reality is a brand which people can sell” he says.” Some of the biggest films on release over the past year have been such – the story of the Harvard student who invented Facebook, the story of a stuttering king – The King’s Speech, Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours, and a story for which Applebaum was herself a historical consultant, The Way Back.

But Hollywood and history are strange and uneasy bedfellows and not everyone is happy with the progeny they produce. Hollywood has played fast and loose with historical truth on so many occasions that we approach new movies based on history with not a little suspicion. But they keep coming and the latest soon to appear on a screen near you will be Roland Joffé’s new film, There Be Dragons – which some anticipate will be a return to form for the director of two of the most memorable films of the 1980s, The Mission and The Killing Fields, both again based on real events in history.

Joffé’s film, starring Charlie Cox, Wes Bentley, Dougray Scott and Olga Kurylenko, is set against the background of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War and the life of a canonised saint, Josemaría Escrivá (Cox), the founder of Opus Dei. The genre into which this movie fits, however, has much more in common with the historical novel than with films purporting to be a narrative account of historical events. In this there is a very open mixture of fact and fiction and without doubt the film-maker is setting out to show us what moves, inspires and shapes lives rather than give us a dry factual account of events. In every sense this is very much an auteur work since Joffé not only directs but also conceived and wrote the screenplay.

Applebaum’s musing on history and cinema are in the context of The Way Back, the recently released Peter Weir film based on a “true story” of prisoners escaping from Stalin’s gulag back in the 1940s. The original story came in the form of a book called The Long Walk by Slavomir Rawicz, a Gulag survivor. It was a controversial book because while it appeared to be a first-hand account of Rawicz’s own story it later transpired that it was a story told to him by another escapee.

But, Applebaum argues that the story, certainly as portrayed in the film, is “true” in every way that matters. “Many of the camp scenes are taken directly from Soviet archives and memoirs. The starving men scrambling for garbage; the tattooed criminals, playing cards for the clothes of other prisoners; the narrow barracks; the logging camp; the vicious Siberian storms. Among the very plausible characters are an American who went to work on the Moscow subway and fell victim to the Great Terror of 1937, a Polish officer arrested after the Soviet Union’s 1939 invasion of Poland and a Latvian priest whose church was destroyed by the Bolsheviks.”

Joffé argues for the same kind of truth in his There Be Dragons, a truth built into the fictional story of London-based investigative journalist Robert Torres (Scott) who tries to unravel a deadly mystery nearly 70 years old that links his father to the founder of a Catholic organization called Opus Dei, only to discover that the shocking truth is far more than he bargained for.

Roland Joffé describes his experience of bringing the story to the screen in the following terms: “There Be Dragons was a wonderful experience that paralleled the one I had making The Mission. It is an intimate story of love and forgiveness set during one of the most bitter wars of the 20th century. Yet the themes of the film are as relevant today as ever, and I am hopeful that audiences will embrace them in that spirit.”

The film, made for $35 million, is being distributed in the US by Samuel Golden Films and is being released there on May 6. According to Meyer Gottlieb, president of the company: “We feel privileged to be working with such an acclaimed filmmaker in Roland Joffé and look forward to bringing There Be Dragons to audiences everywhere. This beautifully mounted and executed film based on true events is moving and inspirational, and it will make moviegoers cheer and applaud.”

The film has been made in English but rather unusually is having its dubbed Spanish language version released first. Its Spanish distributors have pushed and succeeded in getting it released there on screens across the country from 25 March. The release in Spain is timely because 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. During this brutal conflict thousands of priests and nuns were persecuted and murdered. How a still-divided Spanish society will react to this retelling of those events is something which will be watched with great interest.

The film’s themes are already resonating with people of all faiths who must make daily choices to “conquer the dragons” – the allusion of the title – they encounter by avoiding conflict in favor of embracing opportunities for forgiveness. Previewers of the movie have described it as “a deeply moving depiction of the triumph of love and forgiveness”.

Motive Entertainment, the company that championed films like Mel Gibson’s The Passion and Disney’s Chronicles of Narnia, have been contracted to promote the film across the US and further afield in the Anglophone world.

See trailers: http://www.youtube.com/user/therebedragonsfilm

The Elephant At the Polling Station

On By Michael KirkeIn National and International Affairs4 Comments

There’s no question about it. There’s an elephant in the room and there is a massive conspiracy of silence to say nothing about it among in the mainstream Irish media covering the general election set to take place there on February 25. But hell hath no fury like an animal such as this when roused to anger by being ignored. Some are just now beginning to prod this one into action.

Admittedly Ireland’s continuing struggles to escape the clutches of the biggest recession, probably in its history, preoccupies both the electorate and the politicians in this campaign. But other issues are also at stake and these are the one the politicians are furtively seeking to avoid. Proposals to legislate for abortion, for gay marriage and limiting choice of schools to parents are all there in the small print. Like small print everywhere the hope of the printer is that it might not be read. On these issues it is Ireland’s own version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

The first mainstream flagging of the abortion issue came last week in David Quinn’s weekly column in Ireland’s biggest broadsheet, the Irish Independent.  www.independent.ie/opinion/analysis/david-quinn-any-vote-for-the-labour-party-is-a-vote-for-abortion-2535719.html . He spelt out the reality confronting the Irish electorate on these issues and effectively asked them to wake up to it.

These questions have become important because the final composition of the Irish parliament will most likely leave the two centre right parties (Fianna Fail and Fine Gael) without overall majorities. They will then have to look for government partners among the left-liberal groupings, Labour and the Greens. The polls currently suggest that the new Irish government will be formed from a coalition of Fine Gael and Labour. It is the familiar story of the tail getting to the position where it can wag the dog on social policy while the centre right gets on with the economic business. That is what happened in the outgoing parliament where the liberal Greens got their pound of flesh in the form of civil partnership legislation for homosexuals. For all those who campaigned on this issue, this was only a half-way house. The same groupings are now going all out for full gay-marriage legislation. That is no surprise, nor would it be seen as much of a threat by those opposed to these changes if these groupings were not in danger of getting an influence in the new parliament far beyond what their actual electoral support would warrant.

Quinn put his finger on the heart of the problem in his column when he pointed to the failure of the electorate to waken up to this danger. As he sees it – from his reading of the traditional sector of the electorate “a lot of them haven’t the first clue about Labour’s position on abortion. Amazing, but true. They don’t know, for example, that Labour wants to legislate for (a court) ruling of 1992. That ruling allows for abortion, and furthermore, it permits abortion simply on the say-so of a medical practitioner – it doesn’t have to be a doctor or psychiatrist – who is willing to say that his or her patient is suicidal.

In addition, Eamon Gilmore (Labour Party leader) favours abortion where the ‘health’ of the mother is in danger. In practice, this would replicate in Ireland the British abortion law. In Britain, abortion is permitted where a woman’s life or health is at risk. Health includes mental health. In practice, this translates into abortion-on-demand.

Gilmore favours this policy despite the fact that Ireland is the safest place in the world for a woman to have a baby, according to World Health Organisation figures.

And from a Catholic and Christian point of view, it is not only Labour’s stance on abortion that is problematic. It favours same-sex marriage and same-sex adoption. Its attitude towards denominational schools is also a problem.”

Quinn then deals with what he sees as the failure of the sector of the electorate for which traditional values on these issues are important.  He sees two categories of error being made by some of those who might be thinking of voting for Labour. The first category of are those who just don’t know the party’s position on abortion; the second category  somehow manages to rationalise away the Labour position, to say that it doesn’t matter, or that there are more important issues to be considered. Some, he finds, seem to think Labour doesn’t really mean it. “Sorry, it does. If it gets a chance – and that will be up to Fine Gael – we will have abortion in this country.”

 

The response to Quinn’s column seemed to bear out his point – so far. There were just three letters in the paper the following day and the politicians in the two main parties themselves studiously avoided the issue. I say “so far” because there are some signs that the Labour Party is now coming out more clearly on these issues. If it does so it may force the electorate – or the sizeable sector of it which, if awake, would be concerned about these matters to ask the main parties’ prospective members of parliament where they stand. They might then ask them fair and square whether, if in power with Labour, will they give their backing to health social legislation which denies the unborn their rights, denies society the marriages it needs to maintain the family as a meaningful institution, and denies parents the right to a choice of school without penalizing them financially.

The day after Quinn’s column appeared the paper’s deputy political editor, Michael Brennan, reported that the “Labour Party is making a pitch for the ‘gay vote’ by calling for a same-sex marriage referendum – but it risks alienating more conservative voters. Leader Eamon Gilmore yesterday said the party wanted to push ahead with a referendum to allow gay people the same right to marry as straight people.”  And on abortion he said “Labour is still maintaining its policy on another divisive social issue – it wants to introduce legislation which would copper-fasten the right of women to access life-saving abortions.”

However, Brennan warned, Labour’s social policies could cause divisions with its likely coalition partner Fine Gael, which is opposed to holding an abortion referendum and has not publicly backed same-sex marriages.

Fine Gael’s leader, and the man most likely to be Ireland’s next prime minister, is still less than forthright on exactly what terms he will enter coalition with Labour if he fails to gain an overall majority for this own party. Campaigning in Galway last week one journalist observed him as follows: “Enda has a word for everyone and looks like he’ll stand talking to anyone for as long as his aides will tolerate it. He engages in extended impromptu discussions about abortion, Shell to Sea (a local controversy in the West), the pubic service, and each time sets out his position in full.” Really?

The electorate knows he is “personally” opposed to abortion and considers marriage as a bond between a man and a woman. But but they have also heard him acknowledge that “there are other points of view”. What those seemingly tolerant words will mean if and when he come to form a government with those of that other point of view is what the traditional electors of Ireland do not yet know. The elephant is still in the room.

The Last Straw: booting Boots

On By Michael KirkeIn General2 Comments

This one is a little – perhaps more than a little – personal. My conscience has been troubling me over the past few weeks. I have not had occasion to go to my favourite pharmacist since the Boots chain announced its intentions of providing, from January 12, over-the-counter “emergency contraception” in its Irish stores. My favourite pharmacist is, sadly, a Boots pharmacist. While this is personal it is also a matter which touches directly on the common good of our society and the life and death of human beings. As such I feel I should make my personal response a little public.

It seems to me that, yet again, we have here an instance of corporations taking another step to obliterate all sense of the identity and value of human life in their ruthless pursuit of profits – and then boast of it as “service to the public”.

 I have written as follows to my pharmacist – but do not disclose here either the identity or my pharmacist or the Boots branch where, until January 11, I have been a customer.

 “I have been a customer with Boots for a good number of years now. From time to time I have had misgivings of conscience about this choice of pharmacy in view of some of the products which you provide to the public. Until now I have given the company the benefit of my doubts. However, on reflection, in relation to the latest service which you have announced which you are providing – effectively an abortifacient medication as a so-called ‘emergency contraception’ – I can no longer give Boots the benefit of the doubt. This is contrary to the moral norms which I consider absolute in relation to our responsibility for human life. I don’t think I need to spell this out.

“As a consequence I would request that you set aside for collection, or send to me by post, any current prescriptions which you are holding there so that I can transfer them to one of my local pharmacies.

 “I very much regret having to do this and wish to express my appreciation for your personal courtesy and advice over the past few years. Even though I moved house in September my appreciation for this help was the reason why I had hoped to retain my account with Boots despite some inconvenience. Unfortunately, powers – which I would like to think, are beyond your control – now make it impossible for me to do so any more.

Yours gratefully…”

Garvan Hill: 2010 in review

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

Healthy blog!

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Fresher than ever.

Crunchy numbers

Featured image

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 2,100 times in 2010. That’s about 5 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 24 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 53 posts. There were 3 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 920kb.

The busiest day of the year was August 16th with 72 views. The most popular post that day was The End of Cocoon Culture.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were mercatornet.com, facebook.com, mail.live.com, mail.yahoo.com, and google.ie.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for garvan hill, michael kirke, garvan wordpress, and the gods are just. no doubt. but their code of law is dictated, in the last resort, by the people who organize society; providence takes its cue from men.”.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

The End of Cocoon Culture August 2010
4 comments

2

Brave New World Now? September 2009
1 comment

3

About March 2007
6 comments

4

The State We’re In July 2010
2 comments and 1 Like on WordPress.com,

5

A Distasteful Display of Acrimony: Frank Rich on Mel Gibson July 2010
4 comments

A Song Which Every Age Needs To Sing

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters4 Comments

Germaine Greer, for whom I’ve always had a soft spot, maybe a misguided one, once did a television programme on the Psalms. It was a slaughterhouse of a programme. I can’t remember her liking them for anything – neither their poetry, their power, their antiquity nor their mystery. They were evidence for her of man’s creation of a terrible God.

Her reading of the Psalms saw nothing in them other than weapons used by men to wield a terrible power over their fellowmen.  What a pity. But then if you reject God and substitute him with your own fantasy, what have you left? You lose all sense of the unfathomable mystery of his goodness, mercy and fearsome power. You fail utterly to see that the fearsomeness of God is a radically different thing from the fearsomeness of man. Inevitably you end up concentrating on power as a terrible and terrifying thing, conjuring up all the images and memories of the deeds of any or all of the monstrous regiment of human beings who have been corrupted by too much power down through history.

But read God as he is, as the divinity that we can only comprehend as “through a glass darkly”, and our whole reading of the psalms becomes a totally different experience.

Take just the second song of the Psalter as an example, one singled out for special opprobrium by Ms. Greer. Read it as a mythological text and it will certainly confound you. At best it will be a text depicting an epic tribal struggle between ancient peoples. At its worst it will be a call to arms dangerously akin to a contemporary jihad.  But read it as the Word of God, as the Word revealed to us in the total context of Sacred Scripture and Tradition and you have a text which speaks to all ages and speaks overwhelmingly of God as the loving Father from whom all fatherhood takes its name. It certainly reveals an all-powerful God to us. But with power to what end? It reveals a God who has the power to conquer the world – as in “the world, the flesh and the devil” – and power above all to make us sons of God, heirs to the kingdom of heaven. It is a song which every age needs to sing, for in every age – and in our own par excellence – there is the temptation that we are losing that battle.

The Church’s chosen antiphon opening the recitation of this psalm sets the tone of confidence which pervades it: His kingdom is a kingdom of all ages, and all kings shall serve and obey him. The opening line then asks a question which never ceases to be relevant. Why this tumult among nations, among peoples this useless murmuring?  This is followed by the familiar spectacle of folly we see around us every day: They arise, the kings of the earth, princes plot against the Lord and his Anointed.

 

Then comes the harder bit, the bit that gave Germaine so much trouble, the call to action. “Come, let us break their fetters, come let us cast off their yoke”.  He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord is laughing them to scorn. Then he will speak in his anger, his rage will strike them with terror. “It is I who have set up my king on Zion, my holy mountain”.  But what Germaine misses is that this is more than a text of its time, written in history and in the spirit of its time. It is that but it is more than that. It is a text for all time, about all time, and with a meaning that utterly transcends the spirit of its time, the spirit of monarchic conflict between ancient tribes in the Middle East. It is a text about the Messiah, the Saviour of the human race, coming to effect the adoption of all members of that race as children of his Father, God. I will announce the decree of the Lord: the Lord said to me: “You are my Son. It is I who have begotten you this day. Ask and I shall bequeath you the nations, put the ends of the earth in your possession. With a rod of iron you will break them, shatter them like a potter’s jar”. In truth we break ourselves when we indulge ourselves in all this useless murmuring and plot against the Lord and his Anointed. What, indeed, is all this talk about a “broken society” in modern Ireland, Britain and America, but a fulfillment of these ancient prophesies?

St. Josemaría Escrivá reads this Psalm as a profound expression of God’s paternity, God’s intervention in human history to save us from ourselves. “The kindness of God our Father has given us his Son for a king. When he threatens he becomes tender, when he says he is angry he gives us his love. You are my son: this is addressed to Christ — and to you and me if we decide to become another Christ, Christ himself. Words cannot go so far as the heart, which is moved by God’s goodness. He says to us: You are my son. Not a stranger, not a well‑treated servant, not a friend — that would be a lot already. A son! He gives us free access to treat him as sons, with a son’s piety and I would even say with the boldness and daring of a son whose Father cannot deny him anything.” (Christ Is Passing By, 185)

 

The psalm ends with a warning. If it is a warning which seems to contain a threat, it is one which we must again read in the context of all of Revelation and the history of our Redemption. Now, O kings, understand, take warning, rulers of the earth; Serve the Lord with awe and trembling, pay him with your homage. Lest he be angry and you perish; for suddenly his anger will blaze. Christ did make a whip of cords and did throw the traders out of the temple. But when those traders then turned on him later he went like a lamb to his death. Here is a mystery which we can only be in awe of but which the last line of the psalm gives us the key to: Blessed are they who put their trust in God. Without that trust we will remain in the muddle in which we found Germaine Greer when she attempted to interpret this great Messianic psalm without the help of its Author.

Calling All Grumbletonians

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

Are you a “grumbletonian”? The word – if you can call it that – looks new but is in fact at least 200 years old. You can check it out in Francis Grose’s 1785 Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue. It describes, obviously enough, a person who is constantly dissatisfied with life and everything else. We would all rather not be described as such but in the present climate, national or international, it is hard not to succumb to grumbletonianism.

But the trouble with this condition is that it produces a severe partial blindness – we see only the bad and the ugly and miss out on the good. Our current preoccupation with the Great Recession and the political turmoil it has brought in its wake has infected too many of us with this virus. For example, if we were asked to give a summary of the economic developments in the world over the past five or six years what would we come up with? Or if asked to compile the top ten headlines of world news over the same period what would the list look like? It would be replete with economic chaos stories, power-shifts deemed to be of an ominous kind, debt and dropping standards of living. Certainly, there would seem to be very little to cheer about.

But in fact there is a great deal to cheer about. The dramatic changes of the past few years have not all been bad. Indeed, perhaps, the dominant and potentially more permanent change has been very good news indeed. Two fellows of the Brookings Institution in Washington, Laurence Chandy and Geoffrey Gertz, in a recent article in the Financial Times, have drawn our attention to one very good piece of news. In the years between 2005 and 2010 more people have been lifted out of poverty than has ever been done before in the history of the world, over such a short period.

Poverty has been defined by the United Nations and the World Bank as the condition of those people who are living on less than $1.25 a day. In 2005 that left a total of 1.37 billion people across the world below the poverty line – about one third of them in China and about 208 million in India. The World Bank has not updated its figures since then but the Brookings Institution has now produced a report which updates the picture and the change is, to put it mildly, very encouraging.

Their estimate is that between 2005 and 2010, nearly half a billion people escaped extreme hardship, as the total number of the world’s poor fell to 878 million people. “Never before in history”, Chandry and Gertz maintain, “have so many people been lifted out of poverty in such a short period. The U.N. Millennium Development Goals established the target of halving the rate of global poverty between 1990 and 2015; this was probably achieved by 2008, some seven years ahead of schedule. Moreover, using forecasts of per capita consumption growth, we predict that by 2015, fewer than 600 million people will remain poor. At that point, the 1990 poverty rate will have been halved and then halved again.”

Now, should we not call that progress?

This decline in poverty is universal. It is happening in all the world’s regions and most of its countries, though at varying speeds. The emerging markets of Asia are recording the greatest successes; the two regional giants, China and India, are likely to account for three-quarters of the global reduction between 2005 and 2015. Over this period, Asia’s share of the world’s poor is anticipated to fall from two-thirds to one-third, while Africa’s share is expected to rise to nearly 60 percent. Yet Africa, too, is making advances; they estimate that in 2008 its poverty rate dropped below the 50 percent mark for the first time. By 2015, African poverty is projected to fall below 40 percent, a feat China did not achieve until the mid-1990s.

“These findings are likely to surprise many, but they shouldn’t,” they conclude. “We know that growth lies at the heart of poverty reduction. As the growth of developing countries took off in the new millennium, epitomized by the rise of emerging markets, a massive drop in poverty was only to be expected.

“With few exceptions, however, those who care about global development have been slow to catch on to this story. We hear far more about the 64 million people held back in poverty because of the Great Recession than we do about the hundreds of millions who escaped impoverishment over the past six years. While there is good reason to focus public attention on the need to support those still stuck below the poverty line, there is also reason to celebrate successes and to ensure that policy debates are grounded in reality.”

If all this is a by-product – in part anyway – of emerging economies unsettling the global status quo, and consequent power-shifts, perhaps we should be happy to set aside our silly and self-centred worries about loss of hegemony and start cheering again. So, let us all ease up on the grumbling. There is some really good news out there .

Right To Be Born Is Centre-stage in Ireland Again

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture MattersLeave a comment

The following post appeared on www.MercatorNet.com before Christmas.

The issue of the right to life of the unborn child became centre-stage in Ireland again in December with a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights. The court ruled on a case brought before it alleging the denial of human rights to three women who were unable to have abortions in Ireland because of its constitutional ban on the procedure. The rulings immediately set off a fire-storm of differing interpretations on the ruling and whether or not it obliges the Irish State to abandon its prohibition on abortion. Clearly the Pro-life activists and those wishing to see abortion available in Ireland were lining up for another all-out battle on the issue.

The Strasbourg-based court, which is separate from the EU, adjudicates on human rights issues among all 47 member states of the Council of Europe.

The identities of the women involved are confidential. They have only been known to the public as A, B and C. Two are Irish and one is a Lithuanian who was living in Ireland. After they failed to get an abortion in Ireland they travelled to the Britain for the procedure. The pro abortion campaign then took up their case and processed it through the Irish courts – but to no avail. Their last port of call was the ECHR which has now given its judgement.

They include a woman who received chemotherapy for cancer; a woman who ran the risk of an ectopic pregnancy; and a woman whose children were placed in care as she was unable to cope. Although the court has only found in favour of the first woman, the headlines are proclaiming that the ruling has found that Ireland has failed to properly guarantee the constitutional right to abortion to which a woman is entitled when her life is at risk.

This distinction harks back to an Irish Supreme Court ruling in the 1990s when the Irish Constitution’s prohibition on abortion was overruled by that court in the case of a young girl who had been statutorily raped and became pregnant. This was know as the “X” case, since the girl could not be named. The court, on the basis of an opinion – which many found medically questionable – that the girl was in danger of committing suicide, declared that her right to life took precedence over the life of the unborn child. A miscarriage ended that tragic story but the Court’s ruling left Ireland’s legal position on abortion in very disputed territory. The campaign behind the case of these women was designed to bring all this to a head and open up the possibility for women to have abortions in Ireland.

In this case the Irish Government defended the status quo on Ireland’s abortion laws, maintaining that it was based on “profound moral values deeply embedded in Irish society”. Its legal team argued before the court that the ECHR had consistently recognised the traditions of different countries regarding the rights of unborn children and maintained that this case sought to undermine these principles and align Ireland with countries with more liberal abortion laws.

Nevertheless, the court unanimously ruled that the rights of one of the three women were breached because she had no “effective or accessible procedure” to establish her right to a lawful abortion. The woman’s case was that she had a rare form of cancer and feared it would relapse when she became pregnant. She was unable to find a doctor willing to make a determination as to whether her life would be at risk if she continued to term.

The court concluded that neither the “medical consultation nor litigation options” relied on by the Government constituted an “effective or accessible procedure”. “Consequently, the court concluded that Ireland had breached this applicant’s right to respect for her private life given the failure to implement the existing constitutional right to a lawful abortion in Ireland.” The court ruled that there had been no violation of the rights of the two other women involved in the case – “A” and “B”.

The failure of the campaign to secure a ruling in its favour in all three cases gives some encouragement to the pro-life movement in Ireland – and indeed in Europe. It means that the Court, at its highest level, has not declared abortion as such to be a human right under the term of the European Convention on Human Rights.

The ECHR ruling has put the issue back on the political agenda in Ireland and is likely to force all the political parties now heading into a General Election in Spring to adopt clear policies on the matter. They will not like this. Until now, with the exception of the left-wing Labour and green parties – the politicians have shied away from the issue knowing how complex it in fact is. It touches deep matters of conscience which they would rather not have to engage with.

Interestingly enough, this week the Fianna Fail Party, the main party in the present government has reached a historic low in opinion polls – because of its perceived mis-handling of the economy. As the most traditional party it would however, be seen as the natural pro-life party and might well see this issue as a life-line. Were it to take a very pro-life line on legislation – because whatever government comes in will now, it seems, have to frame legislation on this issue. The most recent opinion poll findings show that 70% of the public support constitutional protection for the unborn,13% oppose it and 16% don’t know or have no opinion.

The Irish Minister for Health, Mary Harney, seems to have accepted that the ECHR ruling will oblige the State to legislate to secure the human right which it maintains the Irish Constitution has denied to one of the women. Others dispute this obligation. Ms. Harney has said the Government would reflect on the ruling and take legal advice. She said the Government would have to come forward with proposals to reflect the ruling. Clearly kicking to touch she added, “However, this will take time as it is a highly sensitive and complex area.”

Professor William Binchy of Trinity College Dublin’s Law faculty, after the ECHR announced its decision, said that the ruling “would require detailed analysis over coming days but some clear points emerge immediately. The most important is that the judgment does not require Ireland to introduce legislation authorising abortion. On the contrary, it fully respects the entitlement of the Irish people to determine legal policy on protecting the lives of unborn children.”

Professor Binchy, an internationally renowned lawyer and author, has always been highly critical of the judgement in the “X” case referred to above. “The evidence over the past 18 years contradicts the medical assumptions of the X case decision. It is crucial to note that the judges in the X case heard no medical evidence. In the years since the ruling, the evidence has steadily built up confirming the opposite of what the judges had assumed – women who have abortions are more likely to commit suicide than women who continue with their pregnancy.”

As he sees it the Irish people must now make a choice. He says that if they were to choose to endorse the Supreme Court decision in X, – which is what the pro-abortion campaign will look for from the politicians – “this would involve legalising abortion contrary to existing medical practice and the best evidence of medical research. If on the other hand, the Irish people choose to endorse the current medical practice, they will be ensuring the continuation of Ireland’s world renowned safety record for mothers and babies during pregnancy.

“Any revisiting of the X case decision would need to take on board the evidence from these new studies that abortion involves significant risks for some women. Based on the current state of medical evidence alone, it would be irresponsible simply to introduce legislation along the lines of the X ruling as it would put at risk the mother’s life as well as taking the baby’s.

“The suggestion that because of this country’s pro-life ethos pregnant women are denied necessary medical treatments is simply not true. In fact, Ireland is a world leader in safety for pregnant mothers. The latest UN report on the safety of mothers during pregnancy found, of all 172 countries for which estimates are given, Ireland leads the world when it comes to safety for pregnant women.

“By all means, let us debate the abortion issue openly, honestly and with all the facts in front of us. But equally, we cannot shy away from the implications of what legal abortion would involve and the brutal reality of abortion, legal up to birth, in countries like Britain.

“What’s at stake in this debate is the value of life, and the sad experience is that once laws permitting abortion are introduced, they diminish the society’s respect for the inherent value of every human life, born or unborn. What we need now is a calm, respectful national discussion, in which the latest medical and scientific evidence is fully considered leading to a solution at a Constitutional level, which will ensure the full protection of all human beings, mothers and unborn children, on the basis of respect for their equal dignity and worth.”

Dare We Hope?

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters1 Comment

Once again we are being given some reason for hope when we look across the Atlantic. Or are we? We might be wrong on two counts. It is sometimes thought that what happens there will begin to take effect here in a matter of eight or ten years after. On that basis, if we see a shift in the US in the understanding of marriage, family, sexual behaviour, and a lot of other things besides, can we expect  that it might follow here? We are probably right on that one. We might be more doubtful as to whether those changes are a basis for hope or fear.

Ross Doubthat, New York Times columnist, commented recently (NYT December 6) on the findings of a survey by the US National Marriage Project. The NMP is trying to measure what it sees as “the decline of the two-parent family” among what it calls the ‘moderately educated middle’ — the 58 percent of Americans with high school diplomas and often some college education, but no four-year degree.

“This decline is depressing, but it isn’t surprising”, Doubthat argues. “We’ve known for a while that America has a marriage gap: college graduates divorce infrequently and bear few children out of wedlock, while in the rest of the country unwed parenthood and family breakdown are becoming a new normal. This gap has been one of the paradoxes of the culture war: highly educated Americans live like Ozzie and Harriet despite being cultural liberals, while middle America hews to traditional values but has trouble living up to them.

“But the Marriage Project’s data suggest that this paradox is fading. It’s no longer clear that middle America does hold more conservative views on marriage and family, or that educated Americans are still more likely to be secular and socially liberal.

“That division held a generation ago, but now it’s diminishing. In the 1970s, for instance, college-educated Americans overwhelmingly supported liberal divorce laws, while the rest of the country was ambivalent. Likewise, college graduates were much less likely than high school graduates to say that premarital sex was “always wrong.” Flash forward to the 2000s, though, and college graduates have grown more socially conservative on both fronts (50 percent now favor making divorces harder to get, up from 34 percent in the age of key parties), while the least educated Americans have become more permissive.

“There has been a similar change in religious practice. In the 1970s, college- educated Americans were slightly less likely to attend church than high school graduates. Today, piety increasingly correlates with education: college graduates are America’s most faithful churchgoers, while religious observance has dropped precipitously among the less-educated.”

So how does that add up to any kind of hope for parts of the world that may have a habit of following the mores of the US after a time? In an Irish context perhaps it means that the liberal elite which we have been accustomed to call “the Dublin Four set” may be about to change. But it also may be an indication that the Faith and Reason dynamic may well be working as we are always told it can and should work. When people begin to think seriously about their human situation, their values, their society – and education is about helping us to do that – then the reasonableness of their Faith becomes apparent to them and good sense in the end prevails.

We may attribute the loss of Faith and Reason among the less educated as partly the effect of the constant barrage of socially liberal propaganda contained in all sections of the mass media – press, radio, television, pop music, cinema. The first generation which passes into the better educated echelons will probably carry this effect with them. But the second generation, contemplating and thinking seriously about the disasters around them created by their parents’ ill-thought out liberalism, may be engaging in a process of full-scale re-evaluation. The Irish ombudsman, Emily O’Reilly, someone who would typify the “Dublin Four set”, surprised everyone a few years ago when she talked about this set beginning to re-evaluate their lives and “tip-toing quietly back to Church”. This may be a big part of the effect that Doubthat is reflecting on in the US.  Let us dare to hope.

Keith Richards’ other church

Philip Harvey, writing this week in the online magazine, Eureka Street, told us that Keith Richards – a Rolling Stone, in case you have landed from Mars – has written about the importance and value of libraries. ‘When you are growing up, there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully — the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equaliser. As a child, you get to feel all these books are yours.’ This was in a book published back in 1995.

Harvey then talks about the Richards’ words at the promotion of his new autobiography, Life (Little, Brown, 2010). “The launch was not in some sleazy nightclub or glamorous rock dive, but at the New York Public Library.

“Richards spoke eloquently, revealing that he had originally aspired to be a librarian. He said that the library is the only place around where he willingly obeys the rules. This infers that he is an old-fashioned visitor, used to libraries that have not been turned into chat cafes.

“He declared that when he walks into a library he is always made truly aware of civilisation, of something that we are part of and that is at the same time greater than we are. This from a man who once led a side project band called The New Barbarians.

“At primary school in the 1960s I was inevitably caught up in the major dispute of the times and have never changed my position that the Beatles are greater than the Rolling Stones. I am not the only one who thinks their last great record was Some Girls (1978), with its magnificent soul masterpiece ‘Miss You’.

“Their subsequent career reminds me of those old bluesmen who keep playing the music they love best until the end of time, even if there’s nothing very new going on. But this is unimportant, compared with the dignity, honesty and humility in fact in which Richards relates his indulgent but harrowing life.

“ We still expect Richards to chain smoke, knock back Jack Daniels like it’s water, and never sleep. But Life reveals he hasn’t had heroin for 30 years. The mainstays of his existence seem to be the love of his family, the creation of his music, and libraries.

“Books were his refuge before he discovered blues music. Growing up in austerity England, Richards had no library at home, so values the retreat he has built for himself late in life. ‘It’s my sanctuary,’ he writes. ‘Reading keeps me in one spot. After a life on the road, reading anchors me.’”

Ireland: from the bottom, everything is up

On By Michael KirkeIn Culture Matters2 Comments

by Michael Kirke | posted on MercatorNet.com on Monday, 22 November 2010

How much the current Irish banking and public finances debacle is going to contribute to a pan-European or even global conflagration remains to be seen. Whether or not the Irish troubles are going to engulf Portugal, Spain and God knows who else in a financial tsunami is a matter for the prophets of doom – and there are plenty of them around – to work out.

The worry is that this crisis may end up being a much greater catastrophe on a global level that it is for Ireland itself. We can only hope that the measures which have now been put in place, the funding from the IMF and the oversight that goes with it, will be sufficient to dampen the shockwaves.

The scale of what has happened is greater than any single event since Ireland secured her political separation from Great Britain nearly 100 years ago. The consequences of these events may change the political landscape of the Irish Republic in a way which many have longed for for decades while the historically burdened system has remained as doggedly in place as her beautiful mountain ranges in Connemara or Killarney. As Dermot Desmond, one of Ireland’s leading financiers, one who has come through this debacle with his reputation unscathed and his wealth intact, said recently, “The era of Civil War politics, passed on as a family business across generations, must be laid to rest.”

But while we may describe the events of the past three years as a debacle, it is wrong to describe them as a catastrophe. Real catastrophes cause permanent and irreparable damage and destruction. There is no doubt but that fortunes have been lost – for the most part by the foolish. There is no doubt there will be a degree of hardship for innocent bystanders. But in the longer term these are all things from which we can recover.

In the lead-up to the final capitulation of the Irish Government to the inevitable on Sunday night – its request for international assistance, with strings attached – a great deal of attention has been paid to the so-called shame and humiliation of a proud nation which won its independence at such a high cost.

There has been something of a grand delusion about Ireland’s vaunted sovereignty. Cries of woe uttered by Brendan O’Neill or Mick Hume in Spiked over the past few days — bewailing the arrival of the men in black from the IMF and the ECB — was media romanticism. For most Irish, talk about the nameless, faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats taking control of a freedom-loving little island on the western European seaboard is nonsense.

The plain people of Ireland saw the matter in a much more practical light. A group of incompetent politicians who had been badly served by their own nameless, faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats have had to surrender a measure of their control to a (hopefully) competent team of bureaucrats who will be no more nameless or faceless than those they will now have reporting to them.

Pride has been hurt but the Irish will “get over it and get on with it.” They are a resilient people. They are not afraid of emigration. They have been doing it for two centuries and are used to it. There are 80 million of them around the world. This reality is part of what gained Ireland its second place after Singapore in the globalisation world rankings a handful of years ago. Independence is a delusion. Mutual dependence is what has come clearly into focus as a result of all these events.

An illustration of Ireland’s and Britain’s mutual dependence was brought into focus in the Westminster Parliament last week when Chancellor George Osborne revealed that Ireland is the biggest market for British exports. Ann Marie Hourihane pointed out in The Irish Times: “[I]n 2009 Ireland bought a total of £23,767 million in British goods and services. That was £15,918 million in goods and £7,849 million in services. More than Brazil, Russia, India and China. However, if you add Hong Kong’s figures to those of mainland China you get a total £24,370 million British goods imported there, so Ireland’s figure is marginally below that.”

British embassy statistics revealed details last summer about the extent of Irish participation and investment in the British economy – the number of Irish directors of British companies, for example – which reveal a very different picture from one of proud and splendid isolation. As Hourihane commented, “They provide George Osborne with a good reason for offering us a big loan and they provide us with a very good reason for grabbing George Osborne and holding on tight.”

“It is not just true,” she added, “that Ireland consumes Britain’s food, its fashion, its football and the fun and rudeness of its tabloid culture, its golf, its opera productions, its West End shows, its Formula One, Downton Abbey and Masterchef – we are part of it.”

Dermot Desmond has remarked that Ireland’s success since the foundation of the State is often best observed from outside rather than from within. In an address in Dublin he pointed out that “We are an island nation with real spirit which has time and again fought against and dealt with enormous economic challenges. Today is no different and to appreciate those challenges we should examine the facts of the current situation and not the emotion. Today Ireland exports total €84 billion compared to 1990 when our exports were €18 billion. The growth in technology and other knowledge-based sectors has driven the success of Ireland.”

He recognised that the boom we have just experienced created an unsustainable bubble in property but holds that “the fundamentals of our position in 20 years have been undeniably transformed. Debt to GNP in 1987 was almost 125 per cent and it took almost one-third of the tax take to pay for the interest alone. Mistakes may be painful to bear witness to, but they are incredibly valuable if learned from.”

Another pundit, Agnes Aylward, recalled something from history which she saw as very pertinent to the situation facing Ireland today. Over 150 years ago, Thomas Francis Meagher first publicly unveiled the flag which would subsequently become the Irish Tricolour. Within a year of doing so he was tried and sentenced to death for his part in the failed Young Ireland rising of July 1848. That sentence was subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life in Van Diemen’s Land, modern-day Tasmania.

Before his deportation, he wrote to a friend about the future. It was the darkest of times in Ireland, which was just emerging from a famine which had taken the lives of millions. But he wrote: “Yet I do not, could not despair of her regeneration. Nations do not die in a day. Their lives are reckoned by generations, and they encompass centuries. Their vitality is inextinguishable… Greece has so outlived her ruins and her woes. Italy has so outlived her degeneracy and her despotisms. Thus too, shall Ireland survive all her sufferings, her errors and disasters, and rear one day an ‘Arch of Triumph’ high above the wreck and wilderness of the past. This is my sincere faith.”

Ireland did so and the Irish have no doubt but that the darkness they are experiencing now will give way to a much brighter future.